Daily declarations from the Wall Street Journal columnist.

All posts tagged Internal Revenue Service

One of the great questions about the 2012 campaign has been “Where was the tea party?” They were not the fierce force they’d been in the 2010 cycle, when Republicans took back the House. Some of us think the answer to the question is: “Targeted by the IRS, buried under paperwork and unable to raise money.”

The Democrats had been badly shaken by the Republican comeback of 2010. They feared a repeat in 2012 that would lose them the White House.

Might targeting the tea-party groups—diverting them, keeping them from forming and operating—seem a shrewd campaign strategy in the years between 2010 and 2012? Sure. Underhanded and illegal, but potentially effective.

Veuger writes: “It is a well-known fact that the Tea Party movement dealt the president his famous “shellacking” in the 2010 midterm election. Less well-known is the actual number of votes this new movement delivered—and the continuing effects these votes could have had in 2012 had the movement not been demobilized by the IRS.”

The research paper Veurger and his colleagues have put out notes that, in Veuger’s words, “the Tea Party movement’s huge success [in 2010] was not the result of a few days of work by an elected official or two, but involved activists all over the country who spent the year and a half leading up to the midterm elections volunteering, organizing, donating, and rallying. Much of these grassroots activities were centered around 501(c)4s, which according to our research were an important component of the Tea Party movement and its rise.”

More: “The bottom line is that the Tea Party movement, when properly activated, can generate a huge number of votes—more votes in 2010, in fact, than the vote advantage Obama held over Romney in 2012. The data show that had the Tea Party groups continued to grow at the pace seen in 2009 and 2010, and had their effect on the 2012 vote been similar to that seen in 2010, they would have brought the Republican Party as many as 5-8.5 million votes compared to Obama’s victory margin of 5 million.”

Think about the sheer political facts of the president’s 2012 victory. The first thing we learned, in the weeks after the voting, was that the Obama campaign was operating with a huge edge in its technological operation—its vast digital capability and sophistication. The second thing we learned, in the past month, is that while the campaign was on, the president’s fiercest foes, in the Tea Party, were being thwarted, diverted and stopped.

Technological savvy plus IRS corruption. The president’s victory now looks colder, more sordid, than it did. Which is why our editor, James Taranto, calls him “President Asterisk.” Read More »

1. The thing political figures fear most is a terror event that will ruin their careers. The biggest thing they fear is that a bomb goes off and it can be traced to something they did or didn’t do, an action they did or didn’t support. They all fear being accused of not doing enough to keep the citizenry safe.

This is true of Republicans and Democrats. Their anxiety has no ideology. They all fear being the incumbent in the election in which the challenger says, in a debate: “That’s all well and fine, Senator, we’re sure you’re upset at what happened. But at the moment it counted, when you could have supported all efforts to keep the people safe and bust the terror network, you weren’t there. You were off giving lectures on what you call civil liberties, and explaining why you were voting ‘no.’ Well, life is a civil liberty—and now a thousand people are dead.” Nobody wants to be that incumbent.

Because of that primal political fear, there is a built-in bias within the U.S. government toward doing too much and not too little. There is a built-in bias toward using too much muscle, too much snooping, too much gathering of data. The bias is toward overreach. The era of metadata encourages all this: There’s always more information to be got.

Presidents are very much part of this, as are congressmen, and judges too. Nobody wants to be the judge who didn’t sign off on the request that could arguably have impeded the network that put the dirty bomb on 42nd and Eighth. No one wants to be the judge whose name the U.S. intelligence agencies leak to the press as the real culprit, the real reason they couldn’t stop the bad guys. “Judge Murphy was generally seen as a loner on the bench, a man more drawn to horticultural pursuits and abstruse comment-thread debate on the history of the Fourth Amendment than evenings out with colleagues on the court and in the local bar association. ‘He’s about to discover why people have friends,’ said a court worker who spoke anonymously in order not to appear to be taking sides in the growing controversy. ‘I hope he survives this, even in a diminished capacity, because in a way the law benefits from his kind of detachment and ethereal approach.’” Nobody wants to be Judge Murphy.

Because of the built-in bias in the system—the bias to do too much, to go too far—the creation of an invasive American surveillance state is probably inevitable. Politicians are people who can do math. The number of people who want to be safe, they are certain, is far greater than the number worried about abstract issues of privacy. Moreover, they figure voters are more or less like this: They’ll have their little blog debates about privacy right up until a bomb goes off, and then they’ll all go into a swivet and join a new chorus: “Why didn’t you protect me? Throw the bums out!”

2. There is no way a government in the age of metadata, with the growing capacity to listen, trace, tap, track and read, will not eventually, and even in time systematically, use that power wrongly, maliciously, illegally and in areas for which the intelligence gathering was never intended. People are right to fear that the government’s surveillance power will be abused. It will be. There are many reasons for this, but the primary one is that humans are and will be in charge of it, and humans have shown throughout history a bit of a tendency to play every trick and bend and break laws. “If men were angels,” as James Madison wrote, limits, checks, balances and specifically protected rights would not be necessary. But they aren’t angels. Add to all this simple human mistakes, innocent and not, and misjudgments. And add to that sheer human craziness, partisan lust, political mischief of all sorts. In the Clinton White House there was a guy named Craig Livingstone who amused himself reading aloud the confidential FBI files of prominent Republicans. The files—hundreds of them—were improperly secured and disseminated. Imagine Craig Livingstone at the National Security Agency. Imagine Lois Lerner.

So if we have and develop a massive surveillance state, it will be abused. And that abuse will, down the road, do damage not only to individuals but, quite probably, to the nation’s morale, to its very vision of itself.

But it will make us – or allow us to feel — physically safer. And it may help break real terror networks bent on real mayhem.

Discuss. Really: Discuss.

3. The president said Friday, in his remarks on the NSA surveillance story: “I think it’s important to recognize that you can’t have 100% security and also then have 100% privacy and zero inconvenience.”

But is that really the trade-off? Will a surveillance state make us 100% safer? It let the Tsarnaevs through. We had the surveillance state when they set off their bombs at the Boston Marathon. We’d even been tipped by the Russians to watch them. The surveillance state didn’t thwart the Fort Hood massacre. Maybe in the end we’ll find the surveillance state is massive, cumbersome, costly, potentially helpful, certainly powerful, menacing and yet not always so effective.

4. The president said the recently revealed programs are subject to congressional oversight, which will help keep them from getting out of hand. But that sounded more like a Washington inside joke than a comfort. Congressional oversight of executive agencies has been chronically lacking and lackluster for years. If you are a congressman oversight is, generally, an unrewarded time-suck. It’s housekeeping that demands deep bureaucratic, accounting and now technological expertise. (“Thank you for providing the email records, but is there any chance you have secret email accounts that aren’t included here?”) And usually nobody knows about your good work—it yields little in the way of credit.

Oversight is time taken away from fundraising calls, from the four-minute hit on “Hardball” or Fox, from the urgent call with the important constituent, from time in the gym where you hide from your staff. And Congress isn’t even in Washington often enough to establish ready and present oversight—members work from Monday through Thursday, and then go home to meet with people and show they’re normal. That’s part of the reason the Internal Revenue Service thought it could function as a political entity—they didn’t fear oversight. The General Services Administration on its champagne-soaked boondoggles—they didn’t fear oversight. Do the technicians, data miners, lawyers and technology officers in the NSA warehouses fear oversight?

Props here to Darrell Issa: He does oversight. But his work is exceptional because it is the exception. And congressional oversight still leads us back to where we began: the built-in bias toward doing too much.

5. The security age began on Sept. 12, 2001. The enormity of the surveillance state since has grown. Americans, in the shock after 9/11, didn’t mind enhanced security, and in fact were mostly grateful for it and supportive of it. But built into that support, and the acceptance of the surveillance mentality’s intrusions, was I suspect a broadly held assumption that we’ll just do it now, and down the road we can stop it. It’s just an emergency thing. We can make it go away when we no longer want it. But can we? Do government programs tend to remain static, or wither? Or do they tend to grow? Read More »

Sometimes when you’re writing part of a column you keep getting close to the meaning of what you want to say but you don’t quite get there, the full formulation of the idea eludes you. Then two days later, relaxing in conversation with friends, the thought comes to you whole, and you think: That’s what I meant to say. That’s what I was trying to get.

This week I had one of those moments. I kept trying, the paragraph kept not quite working, the deadline came.

I got an email last night that had the effect of a clarifying conversation. It was from a smart friend who works in government. He understood the point I was trying to make about how the current IRS scandal is different from previous ones and more threatening to the American arrangement. I had written that this scandal isn’t a discrete event in which a president picks up a phone and tells someone in the White House to look into the finances of some steel industry executives, or to check out the returns of some guy on an enemies list.

But my friend got to the essence. He wrote, “The left likes to say, ‘Watergate was worse!’ Watergate was bad—don’t get me wrong. But it was elites using the machinery of government to spy on elites. . . . It’s something quite different when elites use the machinery of government against ordinary people. It’s a whole different ball game.”

It is.

That’s exactly what I meant.

In previous IRS scandals it was the powerful abusing the powerful—a White House moving against prominent financial or journalistic figures who, because of their own particular status or the machineries at their disposal, could pretty much take care of themselves. A scandal erupts, there are headlines, and then people go on their way. The dreadful thing about this scandal, what makes it ominous, is that this is the elites versus regular citizens. It’s the mighty versus normal people. It’s the all-powerful directors of the administrative state training their eyes and moving on uppity and relatively undefended Americans.

That’s what makes this scandal different, and why if it’s not stopped now it will never stop. Because every four years you can get yourself a new president and a new White House, but you won’t easily get yourself a whole new administrative state. It’s there, it’s not going away, not anytime soon. If it isn’t forced back into its cage now, and definitively, it will prowl the land hungrily forever.

One more thing.

One of the reasons a lot of people in New York and Washington are not deeply distressed by the IRS targeting of conservative groups is that they have it in their heads that it only involved the tea party and the tea party is full of nuts, weirdoes and radicals whose discouragement wouldn’t be a grave national loss. It’s not only tea-party groups that were targeted, of course, but the IRS was only too happy to get the idea out there that it was. But if you’re the kind of person who thinks Tea Party people are low and extreme, that they’re the kind of people who’d hurt our country, take a few minutes to look at this. It’s a website that will take you to videos of a town hall meeting of the SouthWest Cincinnati Tea Party. It was held Wednesday night. Its subject was “IRS Intimidation—Are You Next?”

Do those people really strike you as weird and radical? Do they seem destructive? They are normal citizens. And they feel besieged. Read More »

So many people are sad about America and cynical about its government. They don’t expect anything good to happen. They think certain poisons have entered the system and nothing can be done about it. Leviathan will not be cut back or tamed, Leviathan will go on abusing the citizen. People are all too willing to believe the Internal Revenue Service is hopelessly political in its judgments and actions. They are not shocked. They don’t think anything can be done, that the system cannot be corrected. They just grip the arms of the seat and wait for the weather to get worse.

It actually is shocking that the IRS appears to have become political and ideological in a way that is systemic. It is shocking that the president claimed he read about the targeting of conservatives just last Friday, in the newspapers, and today the New York Times reports the leadership of the Treasury Department was told the charges were being investigated a year ago.

And it has to be remembered that this is not your ordinary scandal. Your ordinary scandal is an embarrassment. Somebody did something bad and there’s an investigation or hearings. People are made to suffer for their missteps, if only in terms of notoriety and legal expense. Sometimes the innocent or mostly innocent are dragged in, too. But in the end it passes. Some new laws are passed or rules instituted. And we move on to the next scandal. In a government populated by humans there will never be a lack of them.

But the IRS scandal is different because it speaks of the political corruption of a major and crucial governmental agency to whose rules and regulations every American—everyone who has a job or a bank account, or who engages in a financial transaction—is subject. Most people will never have an interaction with the State Department or the Bureau of Labor Statistics, but the IRS deals with an intimate and sensitive part of your life, your personal finances. It is the revenue-collecting arm of the government. It is needed. It does necessary work. When that work is done well it is rarely noted and almost never celebrated. When it’s done badly it’s a terrible thing, because it means a citizen was treated badly or abused. But as an agency it couldn’t be more important to the national mood, the national atmosphere.

If we allow it to become politically corrupt that scandal will not pass, it will be with us every day.

* * *

Which gets us to soon-to-be-former IRS chief Steven Miller’s testimony today before the House Ways and Means Committee.

It gave a bit of a shock. He’s the head of an agency accused of major wrongdoing but his attitude was arrogant, nonresponsive, full of gamesmanship. His general tone? I am insulated, baby. You can’t touch me. You can make your little speeches and I’ll endure them with my best approximation of a poker face, but at the end of the day what can you do? I’m leaving. I have a pension. You can’t prove a thing It was so bad that by the end it occurred to me he might be a secret whistleblower who’s trying to enrage Congress into digging in and finding out what really happened to the IRS, and how, and when, and who did it, and what the rest of the administration knew.

Mr. Miller repeatedly suggested his agency hadn’t engaged in political targeting, it was just a matter of “mistakes” made “by people trying to be more efficient in their workload selection.” He said the IRS was guilty of bad “customer service.” He said he had never misled Congress when he testified, previously, that conservative groups were not being targeted: “I answered the questions as they were asked.” He stonewalled and nonanswered. Who started the targeting? “I don’t have that name for you.” This from the head of an agency in a government hell-bent to get to the bottom on this.

There was an interesting moment when Mr. Miller admitted under questioning that the IRS’s seemingly spontaneous public acknowledgement of and apology for the targeting of conservatives was not, really, spontaneous, but part of a spin operation. He provided insight into the new IRS mindset in this exchange with Rep. Tom Price of Georgia:

Price: “Is it illegal what they have done?”

Miller: “It is absolutely not illegal.” . . .

Price: “Do you believe it is illegal for employees of the IRS to create lists to target individuals and groups and citizens in this country?”

Miller: “I think the Treasury Inspector General indicated that it might not be, but others will be able to tell that.”

Price: “What do you believe?”

Miller: “I don’t believe it is.”

Oh. Well that would explain that.

* * *

So where does this go? Congress will have more hearings next week. Meaning, I suppose, that more IRS officials will be made momentarily uncomfortable. Also the attorney general, Eric Holder, says the FBI will launch an investigation. The president has said he doesn’t want a special prosecutor to look into the scandal because the investigations of Congress and the Justice Department should be enough.

But they’re not. An independent counsel, with his particular powers and particular independence, is needed.

The targeting of conservative groups and individuals by the IRS was a political operation that had political effects. We know this because only people with certain assumed political views were targeted and abused. No liberal groups were. According to today’s Washington Post, the Barack H. Obama Foundation, run by the president’s half-brother and named after their father, sailed through to tax-exempt status in a matter of weeks.

When a problem is political it’s best to have politically independent people investigate it.

Again, if what happened at the IRS is not stopped now, it will never stop. The next White House will come in and they’ll know they can do it too. And if they’re unlucky enough to be caught, they’ll have a have a few uncomfortable moments in Congress, and a few people who were going to retire in the summer will retire in the spring. And it will all go on.

We are at a point now where you can make a list of things that, all combined and allowed to continue, can kill America. This is one of them. Widespread belief that the revenue-collecting arm of the US government is hopelessly corrupt is one of them.

There is such a thing as national morale. Ours could use a boost. People have grown cynical. They expect nothing good to happen. They expect it all to be swept under the rug. They expect no one to pay a price. It is a matter of profound public need that the U.S. government show and prove that it is capable of correcting itself, that Leviathan can stop itself. Read More »

About Peggy Noonan's Blog

Peggy Noonan is a writer. For twelve years she has been a weekly columnist for the Wall Street Journal. She is the author of eight books on American politics, history and culture. She was a special assistant to president Ronald Reagan, and before that was a producer and writer at CBS News in New York.